Serial data must be transmitted across wired media. The transmit and receive sections include chips wired to one another and card-to-card interconnects. The transmission media can be a combination of printed circuit board, connectors, backplane wiring, fiber or cable. The interconnect can include its own power, data and clocking sources or may derive these functions from a host module. Such data has typically been transmitted through a parallel data bus, such as ISA, PCI, PCI-X and the like. One drawback of such parallel links is the moderate rate of data transmission due to improved microprocessor performance, resulting in data transfer bandwidths that typically outpace I/O transfer rates. Also, the ASIC I/O count is high. In addition, the system integration I/O count using a parallel data bus is high. Finally, the overall system cost associated with the use of the parallel data bus tends to be high.
Related art shows attempts to overcome these difficulties and drawbacks by utilizing serial communication systems involving a variety of schemes. For example, some have used a carrier-less amplitude/phase (CAP) modulation scheme. Others have used a linear compression/decompression and digital signal processing techniques for frequency modulation. Still others use a linear (analog) phase rotator to recover only the carrier of an incoming signal. Some transmit using a pass band, which limits the bandwidth of the frequencies being passed, rather than a baseband channel wherein the signals are not shared and the frequencies are not restricted.